Donald Trump Goes to War Against Universally Hated Paper Straws
The White House's new executive order halts federal purchases of paper straws and calls for the creation of a national anti–paper straw strategy.
Plastic straw partisans are now on the offensive in the straw wars.
Monday evening, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing federal agencies to halt their purchases of paper straws and ordering the creation of a nationwide strategy to end their use.
"An irrational campaign against plastic straws has resulted in major cities, States, and businesses banning the use or automatic inclusion of plastic straws with beverages," reads the White House order.
Those plastic straws were replaced with paper straws that the White House order says are "nonfunctional, use chemicals that may carry risks to human health, are more expensive to produce than plastic straws, and often force users to use multiple straws."
Anti–plastic straw policies started appearing in the early 2010s and really took off toward the end of the decade when large blue cities and a few states either banned their distribution or restricted their use in restaurants, bars, and other public settings.
These policies were a direct descendant of cities' and states' plastic bag bans and taxes. They were spurred along in the public imagination by the viral statistic (originally debunked by Reason) that Americans use 500 million plastic straws a day.
That figure was a rough guesstimate produced by then-9-year-old Milo Cress. More precise industry estimates put Americans' daily plastic straw use at around 170 million to 330 million.
Even Cress' top-end estimate wouldn't seem to rank plastic straws as a serious environmental concern. Litter surveys consistently showed plastic straws as a tiny share of plastic waste. Studies estimated America's share of global marine plastic waste at less than 1 percent.
Nevertheless, the straw banners persisted with their prohibitions on the argument that plastic straws were a "gateway plastic." Once the ubiquitous product was banned, people would wake up to all the other forms of single-use plastics that could be eliminated from their lives.
The reverse happened. Instead of being won over to the cause of eliminating more plastic waste, people got irritated at busybody laws that took away a common convenience.
Quickly plastic straw bans became a symbol of liberal government's petty excesses. The plastic straw itself was rebranded as a symbol of heroic resistance to the nanny state.
When I interviewed Cress in 2018, he presciently criticized plastic straw bans because of the backlash they would likely engender.
Even politicians who supported plastic straw bans acknowledged the inferiority of paper alternatives. Witness Kamala Harris' comments during a 2019 CNN town hall event where she inarticulately criticized paper straws while calling for plastic ones to be banned.
In 2020, the Trump campaign went all in on plastic straws, selling Trump-branded plastic straw merch.
In office, the Biden administration refrained from launching a national war on plastic straws. But Joe Biden's various executive orders did create a nationwide strategy for combating plastic pollution and directed federal agencies to reduce their own use of single-use plastic products.
But the energy that animated plastic straw banners on the left was clearly waning. The nationwide "vibe shift" saw Harris walk back her past support of plastic straw bans once she was on the top of the Democratic ticket in 2024.
The White House's latest executive order calls for a national strategy to end the use of paper straws to be created within 45 days.
That will include, as mentioned, barring federal agencies from purchasing paper straws or discriminating against the use of plastic straws.
It also calls for the strategy to address "contract policies and terms with entities, including States, that ban or penalize plastic straw purchase or use" and "all other available tools to achieve the policy of this order nationwide."
Will this result in its own form of federal pro–plastic straw overreach? We'll have to wait and see the details of the national anti–paper straw strategy to know.
It's certainly within the federal government's power to condition grants and funding on grantees adopting particular policies, including around plastic straws.
Nevertheless, a policy that tells all recipients of federal funds that they can't use paper straws anywhere within their organizations could also end up becoming another cumbersome and unnecessary federal intrusion.
At the end of the day, paper straws are a problem that solves itself.
Americans are a convenience-loving people. Plastic straw bans' attack on that convenience created a backlash that ultimately defeated the straw panic. With that moral emergency now defeated, and federal mandates in abeyance, it seems likely that entities that once went all in on paper straws will sheepishly swap them out in favor of superior plastic alternatives.
